even in the plainest walks of life, carry out any contemplated design, with needle and thread, on linen or cotton, is quite remarkable. Time seems to have no value. It is the custom in many places, for girls to learn all the dainty stitches, and while yet in their teens, begin to prepare spreads, table-covers, napkins, and mats, which when they are married will constitute a part of their household goods.
When the wife of our host came in, she found me intently engaged in scrutinizing the bedspread, and began at once explaining its history. She said it was the work of her grandmother, who began it when a girl. It had been a part of her bridal outfit, and afterwards descended to her mother, then to herself. The material was bleached domestic, but the design was at once unique and ingenious. In the center was a large pattern of flowers and fruit, with the daintiest vines, leaves, arteries, and traceries to be imagined—all done by means of drawn threads and spool cotton. Around the entire spread was a valance wrought in the same exquisite manner. The space adjoining the border of plain domestic, above the valance, was a kind of insertion, filled in with figures of girls and boys swinging and dancing, women carrying water on their heads, shepherds with their crooks, and donkeys with their burdens—all truly represented by deft fingers, guided by shrewd feminine observation. A long flat cotton bolster had a case with several subdivisions at equal distances apart, filled in with fine crochet insertion. The bolster had first a covering of red, then the case stretched on, skin-tight, thus exhibiting the pattern of the lace. Laid pyramid-like upon each other were ten pillows, each one a little smaller than the other, and all decorated with the same lace. The spread and pillow-cases represented years of untiring, earnest labor, and also an inconceivable amount of precious eyesight, which these people evidently regarded as a mere nothing.
Altogether the day spent at Palomas was a most agreeable one, and even now to recall it affords a high degree of satisfaction. It opened to an appreciative eye the inner workings of the home life of the plain country people, in their original simplicity. Ah! peaceful Palomas!—"Pass of the Doves"—name unique and suggestive, for
